Interpreters of the political theory of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss have frequently noted the deep disagreements between the two over both the meaning of political theory and, more importantly, the meaning of politics. Strauss has been portrayed by both acolytes and critics alike as a defender of natural right, the principle that unequal virtue justifies inequality of political rule, and as a defender of the claim that a political theory text needs to be interpreted by finding a deeply embedded unitary intention beneath the ambiguities of its surface argument. Arendt is portrayed as the polar opposite of Strauss, defending politics as speech and action in public, understanding the public as the realm in which we enjoy freedom as equals while still striving for distinction, and fiercely criticising the authoritarian implications of unifying philosophy with political rule. In The Crises of German Historicism Liisi Keedus aims to bypass these debates by placing Strauss’s and Arendt’s early work as part of an ongoing Weimar Republic dialogue on crises of German historicism. For Keedus, Strauss’s and Arendt’s accounts of political theory converge in their attempt to defeat ‘historicism’ in its various forms. And they transport this early debate of their youth to America, where they simply incorporate it both into their more famous works such as Natural Right and History for Strauss and The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution for Arendt. With this thesis in mind, Keedus seeks to reconstruct in minute detail Strauss’s and Arendt’s Weimar-centred ‘horizon of interrogation of the human sciences’ (p. 17), relying less on their later works and more on their early writings, lectures, correspondence, and notes. While Keedus explicitly wants to reconstruct a conceptual field in which their works emerged rather than provide a critical assessment of their arguments (p. 3), she also sets in strikingly sharp relief the intensity of both political theorists’ intellectual struggle to forge a distinct voice, both against one another and within the German debates over the status of history. Despite her own historical impartiality in judging the differences between the two theorists, her account compels us to take sides, especially when we take into account their respective polemical strategies, which she alludes to frequently. More on that shortly.
Focusing on the early Weimar debates, Keedus carefully demonstrates that we can collect a whole series of early influences on Strauss and Arendt around the historicism question – among them the new theology of the temporal caesura, political Zionism, the criticism of Neo-Kantianism, the debate over Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, the incorporation of Carl Schmitt’s notion of ‘the political’ as the friend-enemy relation, and above all the overwhelming influence of Heidegger’s early work on reframing the relation of philosophy to politics. It is impossible in a short review to discuss in detail Keedus’ most thorough discussion of the relative impact of all of these strands of the Weimar debate on Strauss and Arendt. I will only focus on a few of them here. But before doing so, we should note, as Keedus insightfully points out, that ‘historicism’ itself became, for the Post World War I generation, something of a catch-all term for everything that was wrong with Pre-World War I scholarship (pp. 15-16). Historicism for them was not merely the reduction of all ideas to historical context. It also consisted of pure empiricism in the sense of mere accumulation of facts for its own sake, a relativist view of right and wrong, a valorisation of the cultural legacy of the past with no relevance for the present, the whole post-Cartesian tradition of philosophy culminating in Neo-Kantianism, and the view that history had directionality and purpose.
However, as Keedus acutely frames the debate, there are two fundamental attacks on historicism that shaped both Strauss and Arendt. The first was the deeply-felt sentiment articulated by the new theology that the new post-war generation stood in an empty present between a discredited past and an undefined future – a notion that later becomes central to Arendt’s notion of politics as always taking place in the contingent moment ‘between past and future’ and Strauss’s claim that traditionalism could not serve as a conservative criticism of modernity. The second is Heidegger’s early work, in which he famously argued against post-Cartesian philosophy, empiricism, and the notion of an intact historical humanist tradition, that, through excavating the language of early Greek philosophy, we can recover an originary or primordial moment of reflection on ‘Being’ that is always on the way to becoming, never reaching a final resting place. In the process of penetrating behind the reified language of philosophy, he maintained, we can discover that ‘understanding’ is rooted in our existential locatedness in the world (Dasein), and that this existence is temporal rather than transcendent. As Keedus points out, Heidegger’s emphasis on thought seeking the origins behind reified language whose meaning is embedded in time provided both Strauss and Arendt with a fresh approach to understanding political theory texts, political language, and politics as such. More than that, Keedus carefully traces the way each theorist incorporated Heidegger to forge her/his distinctive voice.
For the young Strauss, Heidegger’s approach to philosophising provided a way of discovering an immediate understanding of the origins of Western thought in the Greeks, through the act of questioning what a good and just life might consist of – without necessarily having to assume we can find a final answer. It further allowed him to claim that even though we cannot escape viewing ideas in historical contexts or as developing historically over time, as historicism requires, one can use history to find in texts their originary meanings so that we can understand texts as the thinkers understood them themselves. Initially, as Keedus points out, Strauss employed this approach in his account of Spinoza’s criticism of religion to show that the latter had moral convictions, not rational grounds, for embracing reason. Subsequently Strauss will claim (rather arbitrarily) this interpretive approach allows us to discover the original intention of a text – what we discover in an esoteric reading distinct from the exoteric surface of texts that respond to the historical audience of the time.
For Arendt, Heidegger’s approach also provides a mode of thinking that allows the recovery of original meanings of older texts and older language as they are related to Dasein as temporal existence in the world. Arendt initially employed this in her dissertation on Augustine, where she rejected reference to all past scholarship and sought to read his texts as manifestations of temporality and memory. Later this approach will allow her to cobble together a pre-philosophical language of politics based on a life of action in public. In any event, both theorists redeploy the Heideggerian idiom away from its apolitical philosophical usage to forge their rather different concepts of politics and political theorising.
It is in describing this bridge from their early (generational) encounter with Heidegger and their subsequent accounts of political theorising that Keedus’s attempt at contextualisation comes into its own. There are many moving parts to this story, including Arendt’s and Strauss’s rather tendentious (and contentious) criticisms of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia in the name of defending ‘philosophy’ from sociology. But the central part of the story is how both Strauss and Arendt find their own approach to political theorising beyond Heidegger. Strauss initially embraces Carl Schmitt’s existential decisionism, claiming with Schmitt that human beings are evil and can only be politically dominated if they are unified against other human beings (p. 81). But once Heidegger and Schmitt come to support the Third Reich, he shifts his account of political theorising away from explicit political commitments (p. 85). Strauss now redefines for his own purposes Heidegger’s conclusion that, given the way language works, an author’s intention is concealed from the author and so we are always in the hermeneutic circle. In place of this approach, Strauss claims famously (or notoriously) that ambiguities and errors in a philosophical text may be signs of intentional concealment behind which we can find the author’s intended meaning controlling the text. Applied to political texts, this reinterpretation of Heidegger becomes the foundation for Strauss’s claim that we can read texts within the history of political ‘philosophy’ to find the recurrent meaning that is always a striving for an unchanging sense of the good life and the genuinely just constitution – a form of inquiry already explicitly pursued by what Strauss famously styled ‘ancient political theory’ as opposed to that of the moderns.
Arendt goes in a completely different direction, turning explicitly toward politics, adopting political Zionism on the principle that every group needs a state with rights of its own – an early version of ‘the right to have rights’. But from thereon, according to Keedus, Arendt adapts Heidegger’s apolitical notions of recovering the primordial experience of language in our locatedness in the world to the definition of politics itself. Against Heidegger, Arendt embraces our locatedness in the world and its durability through action and common sense. And, on this basis, she develops her views of politics and political theorising in two directions. As Keedus demonstrates, she constructs the concept of totalitarianism as a regime whose function is the destruction of politics: specifically, the destruction of our place in the world, of our reliance on common sense, and of the very notion of ‘political thinking’ as the discovery of what we have in common through political action in public. As a counterpoint, Keedus shows, Arendt uses Heidegger’s recovery of language to go back to the pre-philosophical Greek political language to reconstruct what she understands as transmitting the primordial experience of ‘the political’: the famous emphasis on a life of action, pursued by citizens in public through speech and decisions on public action – always unpredictable and driven by our capacity for beginnings. Political theorising is now the process of recovering the meaning of ‘the political’ from its reification in the very approach Strauss is offering as the recovery from historicism: philosophising to find the best form of political rule.
In one of the more surprising parts of her story, Keedus shows that when both Strauss and Arendt come to the United States, they do not really adapt their approach to the new more pragmatic view of social science they find there. Instead they shape the American work for which they are so renowned to the problems inherited from Weimar. That is, they continued their criticisms of historicism and history in the American setting, simply incorporating the problems they found in American social science (with its emphasis on positivist theory based on hypothesis testing) into their ongoing criticism of historicism in all its many forms. Here Keedus echoes the work of John Gunnell that American political science found the Weimar preoccupation with historicism and relativism odd and often irrelevant.
There is another mode of argument at the core of the Weimar debate that both Strauss and Arendt took with them to the America, parts of which Keedus occasionally acknowledges but only indirectly addresses: Essayism. Essayism is a kind of cobbling together of entire political and social arguments from pieces of philosophy, history, and social theory. In essayism one defeats opposing arguments most frequently by taking one’s own categories as given – in the case of Strauss what counts as ‘classical political philosophy’, in the case of Arendt what counts as genuinely ‘political’ – and contrasts the opposing views as the negation of these authoritative categories. Moreover, this approach often involves stylising one’s opponent in ways that render the latter more vulnerable than an actual analytic reconstruction of the argument would require. Keedus shows awareness of an aspect of this style of argument in her frequent references to ‘the polemical’ ways ‘historicism’ was used to criticise the present (p. 103). If we read all the debates Keedus discusses through this lens, we can see that Strauss and Arendt were using essayistic strategies to give their core arguments authority precisely in order to supersede their recognition of the time-bound nature of their theories. In the case of Strauss, we see a stylised decline optic of the loss in modernity of a genuine ‘political philosophy’ of the ancients whose aim was discovery the ‘best regime’. We see it, as Keedus recognises, in Arendt’s strategy of reading ‘political thinkers against the horizon of vita activa and its specific phenomenologically reconstructed experience’ (p. 186) and her tendency to address contemporary political events – revolutions, civil disobedience, the Eichmann trial – by adjusting them to her theory rather than the other way around (p. 187).
Now once we take into account the essayistic strategies of Strauss and Arendt, we are left with two alternatives. We can take their polemical styles as historical idiosyncrasies of the Weimar debate over historicism – this is what Keedus does until the very end of the book when she indeed acknowledges the intense disagreements between two theorists (pp. 182-183). Or, we may take their stylisation of politics and political thinking in all its deliberate polemical distortions seriously as part of a fierce debate over what the recovery of politics and political thinking should look like in the present – Strauss’s hermeneutic retreat into a claim that politics should be guided by those in the philosophical know or Arendt’s evocation of public action in tension with ordinary political rule, acknowledging the right of those rendered stateless to have political rights. If we choose the latter interpretation, we are forced, as both Arendt and Strauss intended, to take sides, whatever their Weimar communalities.